A dull day

I saw another newspaper report the other day on how observing nature is good for your mental health. Bird-watching, forest bathing and appreciating bees and butterflies are all touted as beneficial, especially to the smart phone generation who so often have their eyes on their screens. 

But 'nature' is disappearing from our parks and woods and fields despite efforts to rehabilitate them. And the dull days of late December are especially unrewarding, unless you train yourself to look closer and harder.

Today the sky was grey, the air was chill and a low mist hung in the distance. There were no birds or bees or butterflies or beetles to be seen. But there were these.
1. Top left corner: a tuft of rabbit fur and a single rabbit poo. Might this be the earthly remains of a bunny snatched by a predator (fox, stoat or possibly a bird of prey?)
2. Top right: crust lichen shaped like a peculiar sea creature - a example of pareidolia. Lichen is good at likening itself to something else.
3. Centre: Tremella mesenterica, yellow brain fungus. Usually seen on gorse stems. Parasitic - not on the plant  but on another parasitic fungus that's already established on the gorse bush, so a secondary parasite.
4. Bottom right: a leaf miner has mapped its route though a bramble leaf. It's possible to trace the progress of the growing larva from egg to emergence, the grub growing fatter as it ate its way around the leaf.
5. Bottom left: why did the mole  cross the path through the turf and not the earth? Was it because the bedrock is close to the surface here and the mole couldn't get any deeper? Well, I don't know but it's interesting to observe as are all the other tiny hints and clues that living things are or were here, albeit unobtrusively.

Look closer, look harder!.